Rome - The number of hungry people in the world soared to 963 million in 2008, an increase of 40 million over the previous year largely due to higher food prices, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Tuesday. The Rome-based FAO warned that the current economic crisis could tip even more people into hunger and poverty.
"World food prices have dropped since early 2008, but lower prices have not ended the food crisis in many poor countries," FAO Assistant Director-General Hafez Ghanem said, presenting the new edition of FAO's hunger report, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008.
"For millions of people in developing countries, eating the minimum amount of food every day to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream. The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality," he stressed in a statement.
The vast majority of the world's undernourished people - 907 million - live in developing countries, according to FAO estimates.
Of these, 65 per cent live in only seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.
Progress in these countries with large populations would have an important impact on global hunger reduction, FAO said.
While noting that nearly two-thirds of the world's hungry live in Asia, FAO welcomed what it said was "good progress" made in countries like Thailand and Vietnam to achieve the 1996 World Food Summit's target of reducing the number of hungry people by half by the year 2015.
In sub-Saharan Africa, one in three people are chronically hungry, the highest proportion of undernourished people in the total population, the report said.
Most of the increase in the number of hungry occurred in a single country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, as a result of widespread and persistent conflict, from 11 million to 43 million (in 2003-05) and the proportion of undernourished rose from 29 to 76 per cent, it noted.
Overall, sub-Saharan Africa has made some progress in reducing the proportion of people suffering from chronic hunger, down from 34 (1995-97) to 30 per cent (2003-2005).
Ghana, Congo, Nigeria, Mozambique and Malawi have achieved the steepest reductions in the proportion of undernourished, FAO noted.
Ghana has reached the hunger reduction target of the World Food Summit basing this success on growth in agricultural production, FAO noted.
Higher food prices have impacted negatively on attempts in Latin America and the Caribbean to reduce hunger. In 2007 the number of undernourished in this region stood at 51 million, according to FAO.
Countries in the Near East and North Africa generally experience low levels of malnutrition, but conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and high food prices have pushed the numbers up from 15 million in 1990-92 to 37 million in 2007.
FAO noted that while prices of major cereals have fallen by over 50 per cent from their peaks earlier in 2008, they remain high compared to previous years.
The FAO Food Price Index was still 28 per cent higher in October 2008 compared to October 2006.
"If lower prices and the credit crunch associated with the economic crisis force farmers to plant less food, another round of dramatic food prices could be unleashed next year," Ghanem warned.
